A few weeks ago the Russian-Chinese agreement of aeronautical development, particularly in the aviation segment of large passenger jet was ratified. It is well known that Beijing has a major weakness in that area and needs to enhance its industry to be able, by itself, to develop a long-range four-engine wide-body commercial passenger jet airliner.

The development memorandum signed between Chinese and Russian included a large passenger aircraft, no doubt, will be used by the military as a platform for multi-purpose .

The Russian Ilyushin Group will collaborate with the Chinese counterpart in the development of the Russian cargo plane Ilyushin Il-96-400T.

And the potentials are enormous based on this large platform. For example, the Chinese media is speculating on the possibility of modifying the Il-96-400T as the in-flight refuelling aircraft to replace the Ilyushin Il-78 fleet currently in service in PLAAF China.

A tanker version of Il-96-400T will match the capabilities of KC-46 that is based on the commercial Boeing 767 and that certainly would be of interest to the PLAAF and PLANAF.

The planned investment for the Russian-Chinese program "Il-96-400T" is 50 billion yuan (about 6,000 million Euros or about 8000 million $). The final investment estimate is around 100 billion yuan (about 12,000 million € or $ 16,000 million).

The Russian-Chinese Il-96-400T program is not the only one. It was also agreed to develop the Ilyushin Il-103 aircraft and it is expected to reach the production of 200 Il-103 per year. The investment in this program is 800 million yuan (about € 96 million or $ 130 million).

Wow, lovely design...
China will benefit a lot from the jet engine technology since Pratt & Whitney was a partner to the Russian company which supplies the jetengine to the aircraft company.. In other words, there is western technology in those jetengines which China can benefit as it badly wants to make jetengines of its own.